The BlackBerry Bounce-Back?

By: Jeff De Cagna, FASAE

Reports of BlackBerry's impending demise may be premature. Although serious strategic mistakes by the company's leaders over the past decade have inflicted life-threatening damage, a new CEO has set out to turn the company around. What can associations learn from BlackBerry's bounce-back plan?

Few stories from the world of business offer more insight into the consequences of inadequate leadership than the rapid downfall of the once-mighty mobile device maker BlackBerry. My article "The BlackBerry Breakdown," which appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Associations Now, explains some key failures of corporate leadership that contributed to what looked like the company's certain demise last year.